Cineca Super Resets the Bar on Energy Efficiency with Nvidia GPUs

Today Nvidia announced that the hybrid Eurora supercomputer at Cineca in Italy has set a new record for data center energy efficiency using Kepler GPUs. Built by Eurotech, the hot water-cooled Eurora system reached 3,150 megaflops per watt of sustained performance, which is 26 percent better than the top system on the most recent Green500 list.

Advanced computer simulations that enable scientists to discover new phenomena and test hypotheses require massive amounts of performance, which can consume a lot of power,” said Sanzio Bassini, director of HPC department at Cineca. “Equipped with the ultra-efficient Aurora system and NVIDIA GPU accelerators, Eurora will give European researchers the computing muscle to study all types of physical and biological systems, while allowing us to keep data center power consumption and costs in check.”

Pairing NVIDIA Tesla K20 GPUs with Eurotech’s Aurora Hot Water Cooling technology, the Eurora system is more efficient and compact than conventional air-cooled solutions. HPC systems based on the Eurora hardware architecture, including the Eurotech Aurora Tigon, enable data centers to potentially reduce energy bills by up to 50 percent and reduce total cost of ownership by 30-50 percent.

In this video from ISC’12 in Hamburg, Giovanbattista Mattiussi from Eurotech describes the company’s prototype liquid-cooled Eurora GPU technology.

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